Date and Time

Location

Description

We invite you to participate in the UCL History Department's Postgraduate Conference. This year the topic will be Nature's Past: Historical Perspective on a Contested Concept. The event will be on Tuesday 6th of June at the UCL Institute of the Americas from 9:00-18:00 hrs. This will provide an ideal opportunity to postgraduate and early career researchers in history and related disciplines to showcase their research in a friendly environment.

The concept of nature is increasingly questioned. A host of man-made processes- climate change, genetic engineering, the acidification of oceans, toxic pollution, diminishing biodiversity- seem to have dissolved old distinctions between the human and natural. The idea that we now live in the ‘Anthropocene’- a new era of human dominance over ecologyhas sparked debate among geologists, biologists, social scientists, humanists, artists, and policy-makers. This conference aims to place contemporary debates in historical context, exploring how historians engage with nature as an organizing concept, idea, and object of analysis. The interest in nature transcends many historical fields, from cultural to economic, ancient to the contemporary, microhistorical to global. We hope to foster discussion among historians with very different specialisms and methodologies.